Auditors found that many classrooms had large numbers of wrong answers erased and changed to right answers.
The article points out that teacher pay is being tied to test scores, and school districts could be sanctioned or closed if their students don't do well enough on the exam.
The validity of the CRCT is crucial for one of the governor’s major initiatives this year: a plan to tie teachers’ pay to student performance, partly based on test scores. Such an approach is also being pushed by the U.S. Department of Education.Ya think?
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But the focus on test scores has its detractors. Former teacher Donna Williams of Macon wrote in an e-mail that while cheating isn’t justifiable, the No Child Left Behind Act may have created an environment where schools think they must cheat to survive.
“We are doing students and, indeed, ourselves a great disservice with the unrelenting use of scores,” she wrote.
They hit the teachers because we can't hit the sources of stupidity in this society: the Baptist preachers, the fucknugget football fathers, the ditzy mothers, Fox "News", but mostly our last President and his "No Child Left Behind" horseshit.
ReplyDeleteI have several students who are writing about NCLB in my comp class. They are in favor of it. None of them are teachers. But all the teachers I know despise NCLB. Sadly there are more non-teachers than teachers in the country....
ReplyDeleteBefore I say this, I'll say first that I think grading and compensating teachers based on student performance is completely idiotic. Student performance is driven by a huge range of factors, very few of which any individual teacher can control. There are stacks of studies that prove this.
ReplyDeleteBut. Maybe I'm just being a schmuck here, but if grading isn't an excuse for student cheating, how can it be an excuse for teachers and administrators to cheat? Does the system need to change? Unquestionably. Is large-scale cheating acceptable? Come on, people.
I agree with Cass here. If teachers organized and refused to administer the tests, that would be civil disobedience. This is just cheating to avoid consequences, which isn't very impressive.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, I will do anything I can to keep my kid out of NCLB schools.
Better civil disobediance than those rotten tests.
ReplyDeleteI, too, agree with Cass: the tests may, indeed, to be worse than worthless, but that's no excuse for cheating. I'm pretty sure that student evaluations are an equally worthless measure of the value of my teaching, and that they wield inappropriate power over my professional future, but I don't "seed" the envelope with a few perfect evaluations, even though, with my university's present system, that would be relatively easy to do.
ReplyDelete